But I could still fall victim to a password hack. Or Google could just decide to turn off my blog and erase it anytime they want. After all, it's a free service. If Google wants to, it can take its ball and go home anytime the mood strikes it.

I have read posts from several bloggers who felt Google unfairly locked them out. I also see horror stories in the Blogger help groups all the time, though those tend to be user error. There is a need to back it up.

There are several ways to go about doing it.

First of all, Blogger automatically emails me a copy each post I make, when I make it. So I have those posts in my email program.

Blogger does the same with comments. As long as I don't lose my email, I'll have the raw text backed up.

There are back up solutions that rely on RSS, though I haven't explored those in detail.

There are solutions that will download an entire blog as a file. But I haven't been thrilled with those either.

Wordpress.com is another free blog service like blogger. You go there, name your blog, and start creating posts.

The great thing about it, is the import post feature. Wordpress.com added this feature to make it easy to switch from Blogger to Wordpress. The system will grab your posts and simply repost them in your new blog. Unlike email, it will also grab all the comments people leave on a blog and keep them attached to the appropriate post.

Every few weeks, I log into Wordpress and import my new posts. Now I have an active back up. Cromely's World lives in both places.

If something goes wrong with Blogger, all I have to do is log into Wordpress and make my back up visible to the public. Cromely's World would be functioning at a new address, at about 85% of capability, in just a few minutes.

If you choose to use Wordpress.com as a back up for Blogger, there are a couple things you should keep in mind.

First, you should set the Wordpress.com version to private. You can always make it publicly available later. General Public Knowledge suggests that Google will punish sites that have duplicate content by making them appear much lower in search results. Hiding your backup means you don't have to worry about this. Plus, if you are trying to build an audience, you want to make sure they all go to one place to read and comment.

Second, Wordpress.com does not work with certain scripts. You can't embed Youtube videos, and services like Entrecard don't work.

Wordpress.com is a viable back up solution for Blogger blogs. It's not perfect, but it's free, easy, and fairly reliable. If you are not backing up your blog already, now would be a good time to start.

deimos: You will have duplicate content, but that's okay. In fact, it's the whole point of doing a backup. By keeping the Wordpress version (the back up) marked hidden, or marked private, in your Wordpress settings, then the only content visible on the net will be the Blogger blog. The search engines won't index the Wordpress version because it's private. This way you don't have to worry about getting penalized for having duplicate content.

Wow. I never thought of that. I just assumed everything would be dandy, but if I should loose all my hard work, that would be terrible. I'm taking your advice and getting a wordpress account just in case.

BTW how do you get blogger to email you your posts? I didn't know they did that.